Page:Edgar Huntly, or The Sleep Walker.djvu/221

 alarm had indeed been spread about Indians, and that parties from Solebury and Chetasco were out in pursuit of them—that many persons had been killed by them, and that one house in Solebury had been rifled and burned on the night before the last.

These tidings were a dreadful confirmation of my fears: there scarcely remained a doubt; but still my expiring hope prompted me to enquire to whom the house belonged.

He answered that he had not heard the name of the owner; he was a stranger to the people on the other side of the river.

"Were any of the inhabitants murdered?"

"Yes; all that were at home, except a girl whom they carried off: some say she has been retaken."

"What was the name?—Was it Huntly?"

"Huntly?—Yes—no." He did not know—he had forgotten.

I fixed my eyes upon the ground—an interval of gloomy meditation succeeded: all was lost—all for whose sake I desired to live, had perished by the hands of these assassins; that dear home, the scene of my sportive childhood, of my studies, labours, and recreations, was ravaged by fire and the sword—was reduced to a frightful ruin.

Not only all that embellished and endeared existence was destroyed, but the means of subsistence itself. Thou knowest that my sisters and I were dependents on the bounty of our uncle: his death would make way for the succession of his son, a man fraught with envy and malignity, who always testified a mortal hatred to us, merely because we enjoyed the protection of his father. The ground which furnished me with bread was now become the property of one who, if he could have done it with security, would gladly have mingled poison with my food.

All that my imagination or my heart regarded as of value had likewise perished; whatever my chamber, my closets, my cabinets contained, my furniture, my books, the records of my own skill, the monuments of their existence whom I loved, my very clothing, were involved in indiscriminate and irretrievable destruction. Why should I survive this calamity?